Cunningham Lab

Lab Team and Collaborators

Christine Clarke, BS

Christine Clarke joined the Cunningham Lab as a research lab supervisor in June 2013, after supervising the cytogenetics and molecular genetics departments at Seattle Children’s Hospital. She holds a BS in molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is certified as a clinical lab specialist in molecular biology. Clarke brings an extensive background in project management, regulatory compliance and research and development to the Cunningham Lab.

Jennifer Gustafson, BA

Jennifer Gustafson has been a research technician in the Cunningham Lab since February 2014. She earned a BA in biology with a minor in mathematics at the University of Vermont in 2013. Gustafson is most excited about the genetics-based components of craniosynostosis research and particularly enjoys managing the lab’s mouse colony.

Collaborators

Kristen Dang, PhD

Dr. Kristen Dang is a computational biologist at Sage Bionetworks. Her professional background has focused on processing and analysis of high-throughput sequencing data in agricultural biotech and medical non-profit research settings. She received her PhD in biomedical engineering from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with joint training in evolutionary biology and bioinformatics.

Lara Mangravite, PhD

Dr. Lara Mangravite is the director of the Systems Biology Research Group at Sage Bionetworks. Her work focuses on application of functional genomics to advance understanding of disease biology and treatment outcomes with the overriding goal of improving clinical care. Mangravite obtained a BS in physics from Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in pharmacogenomics at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute.

Chris Frazar, MS

Chris Frazar is a research and development scientist in Dr. Debbie Nickerson’s lab at the University of Washington. Prior to joining the Nickerson Lab, Chris was a research scientist with the University of Washington's School of Oceanography.

Debbie Nickerson, PhD

Dr. Debbie Nickerson is professor of genome sciences and adjunct professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington. In collaboration with a number of groups, her lab explores the genetics of disease risk in human populations. She is also developing and testing novel SNP and haplotype-based approaches for association mapping in humans, and exploring the relationships that may exist between genotype and trait expression at the RNA and protein levels in humans.

Josh Smith

Josh Smith is director of bioinformatics at the Northwest Genomic Center at the University of Washington. The center provides services for DNA resequencing and variation discovery, genotyping and gene expression.

Nathan Sniadecki, PhD

Dr. Nathan Sniadecki is associate professor of mechanical engineering and adjunct professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington. His work focuses on the biomechanics of cells to understand how mechanics plays a role in tissue growth and disease and how engineering approaches can be used to improve medical diagnostics and tissue engineering.

Sniadecki received a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and a postdoctoral fellowship in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

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